Margaret Mead and the Heretic: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth

398 Pages·1997·24.48 MB·English

by  Derek Freeman

Penguin Books
Margaret Mead and the Heretic
Derek Freeman was born in Wellington, New
Zealand, in 1916. After studies in the Universities
of New Zealand and London he took his PhD in
anthropology at the University of Cambridge in
1953. Since 1955 he has been an Australian citizen
and a member of the Research School of Pacific and
Asian Studies in the Institute of Advanced Studies
of the Australian National University. As well as
having done extensive field research among the
Iban of Borneo, he has taken a special interest in
the history of biology and anthropology. He has
visited Samoa on seven occasions since 1940, and
spent six years working in various parts of the
Samoan archipelago. He has thoroughly investi
gated Margaret Mead's Samoan researches, both in
Manu'a (where she worked in 1925-26), and in her
field notes and other papers now held in the Manu
script Division of the Library of Congress in Wash
ington, D.C.
In 1964 he had detailed discussions with Mar
garet Mead when she visited the Australian
National University. In 1983 his formal refutation
of Mead's conclusions about Samoa was published
by Harvard University Press as Margaret Mead and
Samoa. It was given worldwide attention and led to
what has been called "the greatest controversy in
the history of anthropology". Today, Derek Freeman
and his wife Monica live in Canberra, where
Freeman, as an Emeritus Professor, is actively
working towards the realization of a new anthro
pological paradigm.
What is heresy, and who are the heretics? The word itself
is instructive. The Greek term hairesis originally meant a
taking or conquering, especially the seizing of a town by
military force. But the meaning shifted to indicate the
taking for oneself, that is, the making of a choice. A heretic
is one who prefers to make a personal choice rather than
accept and support the view held by the majority of his
community.
T. W. Organ, Third Eye Philosophy: Essays in East
West Thought, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio,
1987
DEREK FREEMAN
MARGARET
M E A D
AND THE
HERETIC
The making and unmaking
of an anthropological myth
Penguin Books
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Penguin Books Ltd
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First published as Margaret Mead and Samoa by Harvard University Press 1983
Published as Margaret Mead and Samoa, with addendum to preface, by Penguin Books 1984
Reissued as Margaret Mead and the Heretic, with new preface, by Penguin Books 1996
10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2
Copyright © Derek Freeman, 1983, 1984, 1996
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this bciok.
Made and printed in Australia by Australian Print Group
The line quoted on pxiii) of the preface from Robert Bolt's play, The Common Man, is reprinted by
permission of Heinemann Educational, a division of Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Ltd.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Freeman, Derek.
[Margaret Mead and Samoa]
Margaret Mead and the heretic.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 14 026152 4.
1. Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978.2. Ethnology-Samoa. 3. Samoa-Social life and customs. I. Title.
II. Title: Margaret Mead and Samoa.
306.089994
For David Williamson
Foreword
MEAD'S SAMOA AS OF 1996
MY BOOK of 1983 is being republished, under a new title, to
coincide with the staging in Australia of David Williamson's play
Heretic. Since it was first published, over thirteen years ago, our
knowledge of Margaret Mead's fieldwork in Samoa, and in
particular our knowledge of what befell her on the island of Ofu
in 1926, has been radically transformed. It becomes vitally
important therefore to present a brief account of what historical
research has finally revealed about Margaret Mead's much dis
cussed Samoan researches of the mid 1920s.
In my book of 1983 evidence was amassed to demonstrate that
Margaret Mead's conclusion in Coming ofA ge in Samoa, because
it is at odds with the relevant facts, cannot possibly have been
Foreword vii
correct. It had become apparent that the young Margaret Mead
had, somehow or other, made an egregious mistake. At that time,
however, no credible explanation could be given of how this
mistake had come to be made.
I noted then that the explanation most consistently advanced
by the Samoans themselves for the magnitude of the error in
Mead's depiction oftheir sexual morality was, as Eleanor Gerber
had reported in 1975, "that Mead's informants must have been
telling lies in order to tease her". But I then went on to say that
plausible as this might seem, we could not "in the absence of
detailed corroborative evidence be sure about the truth of his
Samoan claim". In 1983, any such "detailed corroborative evi
dence" was entirely lacking. The situation dramatically changed
however in 1987 when I revisited American Samoa in the
company of Frank Heimans, the Australian documentary film
maker.
At that time, the Secretary for Samoan Affairs of the Govern
ment of American Samoa was Galea'i Poumele, a high chief from
Fitiuta in Manu'a. When I called on Galea'i Poumele in his office
in Pago Pago on 12 November 1987, he announced that he would
be flying with us to the island ofTa'u (the site of Mead's research
headquarters in 1925-1926) where there was someone in the
village of Fitiuta whom he wanted us to meet. When we reached
Fitiuta the next morning, we were approached by a formally
dressed, dignified Samoan lady, who had obviously been expect
ing us. Having greeted Galea'i, she announced that she had
something to say, and would like to have it recorded on video so
that all might know of it.
She was, to my great surprise, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, Margaret
Mead's foremost Samoan friend of 1926, and at 86 years of age
still mentally alert and active. Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, although I
had read about her in Margaret Mead's Letters from the Field
of 1977, was someone I had never previously met. Nor had I
been in any kind of communication with her. During my pre
vious visits to Manu'a she had, unknown to me, been living in
Hawaii. She had gone there in 1962 with her husband Telemu
Togia and all but one of their seven children. It was only on
the death of Telemu Togia in June 1986 that she decided to
viii Foreword
return to her birthplace. In March 1987 she had taken up
residence back in Fitiuta with her daughter Lemafai, the only
one of her children to have remained in Samoa.
The key excerpt from Galea'i Poumele's conversation with
Fa'apua'a Fa'amu on 13 November 1987, translated into
English, runs as follows:
Galea'i Poumele: Fa'amu, was there a day, a night or an
evening, when the woman [i.e. Margaret Mead] questioned
you about what you did at nights, and did you ever joke
about this?
Fa'apua'a Fa'amu: Yes, we did. We said that we were out
at nights with boys. She failed to realize that we were just
joking and must have been taken in by our pretences. Yes,
she asked, 'Where do you go?' And we replied, 'We go out
at nights!' 'With whom?' she asked. Then your mother,
Fofoa, and I would pinch one another and say, 'We spend
the night with boys, yes, with boys!' She must have taken
it seriously but we were only joking. As you know Samoan
girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Mar
garet accepted our trumped up stories as though they were
true.
Galea'i Poumsle: And the numerous times that she ques
tioned you, were those the times the two of you continued
to tell these untruths to Margaret Mead?
Fa'apua'a Fa'amu: Yes, we just fibbed and fibbed to her.
Fa'apua'a had made this confession, she later explained, because
when she had been told by Galea'i Poumele and others about
what Margaret Mead had written about premarital promiscuity
in Samoa, she suddenly realized that Mead's faulty account
must have originated in the prank that she and her friend Fofoa
had played on Mead when they were with her on the island of
Ofu in 1926. Innocuous though it seemed at the time, it was a
prank, she had come to realize, which had had the unintended
consequence of totally misleading very many people about
Samoans. She had decided, she said, to set the record straight
by making a formal confession in the presence of the Secretary
Foreword ix
for Samoan Affairs about the way in which she and
Fofoa had totally misinformed Margaret Mead when she
questioned them about the sexual behavior of Samoan girls.
In 1988 Fa'apua'a's statements of 1987 were investigated in
great detail and her memory of other events of 1926 carefully
checked by Leulu Felise Va'a, who holds a PhD in anthropology
from the Australian National University, and is a lecturer in
Samoan language and culture at the National University of
Samoa. For Samoans, like Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who are devout
Christians, swearing on the Bible is the most serious of sanc
tions. It is believed that the punishment for swearing falsely is
etemal damnation. On 2 May 1988, in a formally witnessed dep
osition, Fa'apua'a swore on the Bible that all parts of her testi
mony were true and correct.
In December 1989, my report on the testimony of Fa'apua·a
Fa'amu was published in the American Anthropologist, and, a
few months later, in British Columbia, I had the great good
fortune to meet Douglas Cole, a Professor of History at Simon
Fraser University, who is working on a definitive biography of
Franz Boas. Professor Cole generously presented me with copies
of the correspondence of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead for the
years 1925-1926 which he had obtained in the course of his own
researches. These, and the additional letters for 1927-1928
which I obtained from the archives of the American Philosoph
ical Society in Philadelphia (where the Boas papers are held),
contained much vitally significant information, and I was left in
no doubt at all about the importance of making a thoroughgoing
historical study of Mead's Samoan fieldwork.
Mead's Samoan fieldwork of 1925-1926 was conducted as a
National Research Fellow in the Biological Sciences of the
National Research Council of the USA. In 1991 I secured from the
archives of the National Research Council copies of all the doc
uments referring to Mead's tenure of this research fellowship, as
well as copies of her correspondence with the National Research
Council for the years 1925 to 1930. Then, in 1992, I flew from
Canberra to Washington to research thoroughly the relevant sec
tions of"the papers of Margaret Mead" in the Manuscript Division
of the Library of Congress. Among my principal discoveries were